


push and pull, moon child

by orphan_account



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Avatar & Benders Setting, Avatar!Mark, Family, Inspired by Poetry, M/M, Misunderstandings, Power Imbalance, War, Waterbender!Hyuck
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:34:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24289768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “You rise with the sun, and you've burned me, you’ve hurt me, but I rise with the moon. I push, and I pull, and I will make sure that you never find balance between the sea and the shore.”Mark chokes on a sob, a pitiful cry. Donghyuck looks too sweet like this, and the wine that flows from his mouth steals his breath, laced with thorns and something Mark cannot dig past. Whatever flame he sparked within his veins will burn him and the nations alive.
Relationships: Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Mark Lee
Comments: 2
Kudos: 25





	push and pull, moon child

**Author's Note:**

> -I know the Boiling Rock doesn’t have labels on the cells, but to make writing easier on myself, I gave them numbers. I apologise in advance for the inaccuracy. Also, heavily unedited (beware)  
> -The inspo behind this chapter title comes from Quinn Lui (@flowercryptid on tumblr and on instagram). I really do not remember the poem it came from, but please do look at her works, she's an amazing poet. If anyone does happen to find the poem this chapter title was inspired by, please let me know!!! (if I find it I'll update this work)  
> \- Feels for this chapter heavily based on the Scarf Dance song from the ATLA soundtrack  
> \- This is set a few years after the start of the Hundred Year War (that isn’t really a hundred years long in this fic)

It is dark inside a wolf who thirsts.

The prison corridors glare at Mark in glorifying decay, lusting after the smell of high treason trailing behind him. Guards litter the metal floors in a consistent sheet of wary hawks. Their gazes trail where they don't belong, scarfing down the uniform they're accustomed to wearing. Eyeing the way it sits atop the newcomer’s shoulders—not quite right—slipping off in red tendrils. Their nation's color and pride. He doesn't look behind and trudges up another flight of stairs with soundless footsteps. He cannot look back.

A thick fog seeps over the directions in his mind, a haze he can't lift over right and left and right and wrong. Another pair of glances snake around towards him. Steely and apprehensive, this time accompanied by slight twitches in the guards' fingers, tiny sparks that don't go unnoticed under Mark's watch. There are questions thrown through the heavy silence, laced sour and perturbed between the fissures in their teeth. He needs to hurry. But before he can, he needs to remember where to go.

When the next few whispers flush the halls with tension, he turns, swiveling around a sharp corner. His change in direction is impulsive and rash and sudden, but the air feels so brittle this way, so familiar. Coarse and unfeeling and alive, so he proceeds with oil-slick feet, and he trusts.

Fate has not been kind to him until today. It might decide to twist his odds, meddle with the chances he took, deem him undeserving of taking them. But he can’t worry about silly things like fate if he wants to see the end of the war. This is reality. And in Mark’s reality, the fate of the war’s end rests in his hands. This is madness.

There are no windows on the Boiling Rock to alert him of how much time he has left before the sun rises. In a whirlwind of muddled thoughts he makes out the _five hundred sixty-one_ . On his left, the metal doors reveal cells in the five hundreds. He lets out a quiet, relieved exhale, pivoting on his right foot when he nears the next corner. _Five hundred forty-nine… Five hundred fifty six… Five hundred sixty…_

Beneath a small opening reads _five_ , _six_ , and _one_ all strung together on a silver plate. He peeks in. At the end of the small cell there’s a bed, untouched and perfectly made. An empty room built upon shadows and the slight tinge of decline is the first thing he finds. It's the first amongst many things he shouldn't have found.

Have they transferred him? No, he shakes his head, that can’t be… the Boiling Rock is the most secure prison in all the nation, surrounded by a boiling lake in the middle of a volcano. The Fire Lord would never send him off anywhere else. He has Mark by his neck, so she needs him here, where she can place her own cherry hands around his. Where he can burn at the hands of his own nature, wilt away while looking pretty.

The nation needs him here, off the pedestal, somewhere where he cannot shine. Somewhere where his light cannot cast the corners of Mark's mouth savage and defiant. Mark’s mother sent the Puppetmaster of the South to the Boiling Rock one week after serving the royal family. To mock and ridicule him, by taking away all he knew and any chance of his escape as a result.

_Bled daggers are high treason in the Fire Nation, my son. You trust them when you hold the higher stakes in share._

Unsure, he reaches out to open the door. The soft clamor echoes through the hallway as he walks in and shuts it. He feels it again, the familiar draft, and in an instant something is pinning him down on the cold floor. _Someone_ , caging Mark's abdomen between warm thighs and—

He gapes through the veil of his helmet. "Donghyuck."

It comes out more of a question than a statement, but one glance from behind the sliver in his helmet and he knows his eyes aren’t fooling him. Two years have passed, but the sun crushed beneath the man’s teeth, the lotus petals blossoming onto his eyelids, they can’t fool him. Lee Donghyuck cannot fool him.

A flicker of red light seeps through the door’s small opening. It turns his silver hair scarlet, his blue eyes purple, and angry. He holds Mark's broadsword above him by its chipped ridges—how he got ahold of it, Mark doesn’t know.

(But he can guess. Donghyuck is strong, always stronger, with a will rivaling the sun. And he bites. He bites nasty, fights dirty, expects Mark to fight back, but he won’t. Not this time. He can’t. They aren't petty children anymore, they’re petty adults, and if they want to fight they’ll fight like men.)

Deep crimson spills from where Donghyuck grips. It's like he's trying to prove a point, shoving the red-glazed tip closer to Mark's throat. _My bending for your nation, my people for your head_. Blood pools beside his head in a dizzying, intoxicating decant that makes Mark gasp for less and more all at once. 

He tries to stop Donghyuck from harming himself further, reaching out with fumbling fingers, but Donghyuck binds Mark's wrists above his head with his other hand before he can touch him. With his right hand, even, non-dominant, yet just as sinewy. He seethes venom, sword trembling with the force of five oceans, salting Mark's lungs with a terrible aftertaste.

In his bout of rage, Donghyuck's loose wool shirt slips off his shoulders, showing too much gold, too much, and it's so familiar, so painful. Haunting, almost, how much has not changed and how much has. New scars ripple across the soft edges of his collarbone. Old ones, too, paintings Mark has seen before, some drawn by his own hand, his own flames. All of a sudden, directing his gaze elsewhere has become a challenge worth losing.

A moment of ragged breathing passes between them, waltzing through like a butterfly blade. Light and sharp, a thief with death's fingers stealing this reunion from Mark's grasp. He could fight it, could fight against it if he had the time, if the weight of a war was not impeding upon this moment he can hardly call theirs.

"I'll kill you," Donghyuck says, a glimpse of black and something akin to hurt in the silver lining of his eyelashes. Ah, yes, Mark doesn’t doubt him. Donghyuck bends water to kill, bends blood to kill, bares his teeth in everyone’s direction to rob them of air. "My name is precious. It's not something you can toss around like those flames of yours, fire filth."

Blundering out Mark's lips is a pained sigh. Someday, when the world has sunk into a sleep free of the weariness that currently looms over it, he will flourish the letters of Donghyuck's sugar-laced title. He’ll catch Donghyuck in his blood-stained hands and try to pen something, anything that could possibly mirror a slight fraction of Donghyuck’s beauty, and he’ll keep it to himself, like the thief he is. Like the fool he is. And Donghyuck will take it back, not because he deserves to strip Mark of what he had stolen, but because he knows Mark does not deserve a single drop of his wine.

Mark hates stealing. He hates harming, and he hates what he is and what he's destined to be. But in his self-hatred there’s a fuel, and he might as well hate if he wants to end the war. Let his animosity end the war the same way the world’s animosity had started it. Someday, in a distant universe, maybe Mark will call Donghyuck _his._ In a different universe, in a perfect world, Mark will hold Donghyuck down by his supple thighs and teeth at the pink claims on his collarbones, free of bloodstained fingers, free of all his bending. And Donghyuck will surrender—he’ll let Mark surrender—and in that perfect world, it won’t hurt so much to filch.

He doesn’t doubt Donghyuck when he says he’ll kill him, but he does doubt it’d please their unfair world if he did. His wince remains hidden under the armor. "Where has all your fight gone, Lee? If I had done this two years ago you would've already killed me by now."

The blade passes through once more. Donghyuck slides off the helmet.

**水**

Faintly, Mark remembers the first time he meets the last waterbender of the Southern Water Tribe, the war machine who stood tall, looking less like another lamb to the Fire Nation’s slaughter and more akin to his equal.

(“If you cage a wolf for all her life and feed her no mercy,” Donghyuck had purred into his ears at the harbor, the sky a cracked portrait of light above them as the warship left, “she will learn to rip it from your hands, to scavenge from the remains.”

His mother told him to snicker, told him to lacerate the untamed boy’s throat so they’d never hear a sound of defiance again, _my sweet and fickle son, embrace this power_. Lee Donghyuck was a starved wolf, who knew the inside of a cage like the back of his hand, dressed in ruby silks to serve the royal family, yet he was a wolf regardless.

Mark, Minhyung at the time, laid one ashen finger on the skin beneath Donghyuck’s collar. He raked the power in his fingers down the golden canvas. And he burned him.

Donghyuck was the one who snickered.)

That day two years ago comes prancing back to him on crystal clear waters when his helmet comes off. The fury adorning Donghyuck’s face is fleeting, replaced by shock, and then something starved, wolf-like and shocked, all in the same stone-cold glint. His lips mirror Mark's sword, parting at rosy seams to let out a warm, shaky exhale. It's hard to read him, hard to read his actions. In one moment, he's swinging the sword around in a circle, pressing the blade featherlight to Mark's neck, and in the next he's a kicked puppy, biting down on unshed tears, one stride away from killing the Crown Prince.

But he doesn't. He doesn't kill Mark, he has yet to and he should, but Mark needs him and the four nations need him even more. He doesn’t ram the blade into his throat, and if anything, it gives Mark hope. The grip on his wrists loosens. So he tries again, fumbling towards Donghyuck's arm. He _tries._

"Lay a finger on me and I'll slice."

Donghyuck shakes with hysteria, and the sword shakes with him, grazing the side of Mark's cheek. More blood pools beside his head. This time, it's putrid, like leather tanning over an open fire.

Stopping it in Mark's perspective seems futile. If he wants Donghyuck to trust him he'll need to burn, he'll need to shed tears because he doesn't no one will. "Donghyuck," he murmurs, low, only loud enough for them to hear. "Please, listen to me, we don't have much time."

" _We?"_ He's laughing now. It's been so long since Mark has seen this side of him, the uncontrollable madman who holds galaxies in his eyes. This side reserved for the hotheaded heir to the throne. "Has it been so long that you've forgotten, Prince Minhyung of the Fire Nation? There's never been a _we_ , an _us._ Get out of my sight."

Emotional blackmail drips off his tongue as lead and poison, sounding too much like the boy his mother rebuked for so long. _Minhyung._ Mark cringes. Above him, his sword quivers in Donghyuck’s hand, and he swallows when it's placed under his chin. At this point, the Fire Nation will have both of their heads.

"Donghyuck, please listen," he croaks, but Donghyuck prances back through the eye of storm, raises the sword and plunges so fast Mark's life flashes before his eyes. He breathes once, twice, opens his eyes on the offbeat of his heart. Donghyuck's quivering, honey eyelids veiling his blue orbs in a secret glare, so he glares back, but Donghyuck succeeds in remaining cold. Water is better than fire at that. Their surroundings provide no excuse not to make eye contact, but he still avoids it like a plague, like it'll end him.

Stuck in the cement, the blade faces dangerously close to Mark's skull. Donghyuck hunches over. He bends his spine until it curves into a crescent and then he pushes himself off, stabbing the floor, stabbing at everything and at nothing, overlapping his angered strokes. If Mark does not stop him he'll kill, he won't hesitate, he’ll be liable for a legitimate sentence and the world will laugh as it slips into an everlasting peril. The heat will swell around his knuckle-bones and he will rip life from the grooves in Mark's spine. Because he is furious, or maybe he has gone insane or maybe he has just lost himself, but he’ll kill, and the bled dagger in his hand will materialise into the fall of thousands.

Mark bends the weapon away upon realising he can move. A haste flick is all it takes for his sword to return to his hands. Donghyuck freezes in his tracks.

The room goes silent. Outside, the guards loom over in a hushed army. News of a war balloon hovering near the volcanic borders has reached them in lead droplets. Now Donghyuck knows. Now, Mark thinks, _now he has to understand_.

Black fervor consumes the last iced truth. There isn't understanding in Donghyuck's lost gaze when he opens his mouth again.

"You're the avatar," he whispers, dropping the sword at long last.

The alarms go off.

**水**

It’s quite fitting, how on par their reunion in real life is with Mark’s expectations, although he expected everything about Donghyuck's reaction and almost nothing about his own poor timing.

Footsteps thunder outside the door separating the cell from the turmoil unfolding outside. The guards are forcing the prisoners to evacuate for inspection. Both of them need to hurry.

“Donghyuck, I’m sorry,” Mark starts, taking one steps forward. Donghyuck steps back, once, twice, three times until he's cornered. “I owe you many things, and I owe you an explanation above all things… But I need to get you out of here first.”

At those words, Donghyuck finally spares him a proper glance.

"You bastard," he hisses, high in his throat, loud enough for any passerby to hear. He looks murderous, looks like he could murder him. "You filthy, shit-faced, sorry excuse for an avatar. You don’t get to hand this… Whatever this is to me on a silver platter and expect me to _listen_. How long have you kept this behind the four nations’ back? You could've saved the air nomads, you could’ve saved my tribe!”

_You could’ve saved me_ , Donghyuck’s eyes seem to snarl, _you promised._ But he couldn't have. He's the heir to the throne of a nation unparalleled, the leader of the army - he _is_ the army, for he is Mark Lee - just as much as he is Lee Minhyung, the little boy he was born into the world as. He is Minhyung, the firstborn bastard child, the boy who burned cinnamon flowers under golden ironwood, the boy who envied Donghyuck like the spirits envy the mortals. The prince who envied his servant because he was twice the warrior he'd ever be, a gunmetal martyr who spilt honey and lavender wherever he walked and let Mark collect the tiny fragments of his wake. You could’ve saved me, Donghyuck says. But how could Mark save the boy who had always saved him? How could Mark know how to save him if he’s the one who needs saving?

“For how long, Minhyung?” Donghyuck bites down on a sob.

How long? Mark’s blood runs cold at that. _Long enough_ , he wants to say. The alarms blare behind him, but they distort and twist under the static in his ears. Donghyuck looks so vulnerable, precious, and it's pathetic how Mark never gets to shine in Donghyuck's presence.

_Long enough, but I'm tired of standing still, even though it's all I know how to do._

“I need to restore your bending,” he says instead, because if there's anything Mark's good at, it's eluding what he should say, “and if I told you, you’d bloodbend me to my death, which can’t happen now. You know this as well as I do. I know I'm in the wrong, where I've always stood, and I'm sorry.”

"The four nations are on the verge of a war's end, my Prince. A war never determines who is right. A war only determines who remains."

Oh, Mark knows, and if there's anything he knows better it's that he won't remain, not if he leaves empty handed. From the minute Donghyuck clutched Mark’s dirtiest truth by its neck began a newfound bond. Stretched thin, after two years of damage, more steel and fire and unshed tears than anything else. Mark has to try regardless, because for the last twenty years he has done nothing as the avatar, yet alone the Prince of a damned nation. He has to try, and he needs Donghyuck to try, too.

"The nations need you," he says, the plead bleeding through the cracks in his lips, _I need you. I need you and I want you like the sun begs for the moon on a promise of poison and burning lands._

Donghyuck steps forward, quicker than Mark can process, slower than Mark can process. A flicker of pain flashes over in the scrunch of his eyebrows when he realises the gash on his palm and he hisses, bites down on his lip. Out of instinct, Mark shifts over the fine line, the fine boundary, using his sweat as a shaky needle to stitch the skin back together. (Once, long ago, Donghyuck had done the same to himself, mending a burn Mark had inflicted upon his shoulder. He learned from watching, from getting tired of destroying. He learned from the best.)

He hears Donghyuck sigh, feels the relief sink deep into his bones when Donghyuck doesn't struggle against his limbs. The breath scrambles out nothing more than a whispering smoke ring, a moonbeam, and he shutters. His fury is something Mark cannot barricade against.

"You don’t know me. I’ll hold a knife to your throat so long as you breathe. I will never need to bloodbend you," Donghyuck pauses, and when Mark finishes healing the wound he continues. "I don't need to lick your blood to control you, to manipulate you. You rise with the sun, and you've burned me, you’ve hurt me, but I rise with the moon. I push, and I pull, and I will make sure that you never find balance between the sea and the shore.”

There's not enough time. The sun is going to rise soon, and soon, the Fire Nation will have both of their heads and the whole world—

"So restore my bending," Donghyuck says, a testimony to the wavering smoke.

Confused, Mark looks up. He couldn't have heard that correctly. Donghyuck would never… He’s not even looking at Mark anymore, _what a brat,_ he’s looking at the ceiling. A rose blush licks at the tips of his tanned ears.

"Come again?"

"I… I still hate you, Prince Minhyung of the Fire Nation. But if I want to survive, and if you want to survive, I'll need what your nation has stolen from me. I need it back."

Angry shouts approach the door. "Hey, all prisoners should have headed to the courtyard!"

Donghyuck turns to him, red lips shining, and Mark curls in on the attention like a prisoner, having no idea what the other is thinking and no idea where they’re going to go. They meet each other in the middle, finding a balance he hasn't met in all his twenty years, a balance he hopes he'll meet again. Donghyuck pulls him to his feet.

“Swear you'll find me amongst the ashes and I’ll swear to reel you in through the tide. Now, hurry!"

**水**

The moon has two hours until daylight filters through her seams. The moon has two hours, so she gives Donghyuck all she can offer, lets her moondust flow thick through his veins. They’re surrounded by a lake, and above all things, the moon, steadying Donghyuck in an eternal balance of push and pull. He’s in his natural element, dragging Mark into it with him to get lost, to hide, to let the moon find them. And the moon finds Donghyuck, her shining golden child. She loves him, pulls him in, she _finds_ him, and pushes Mark out. She pulses in his blue fingers as he hurls the guards away with a beautiful, ethereal dance — and Mark begins to understand why they want him hidden, why they want him gone. Because if the Puppetmaster of the South does not hide from you, you hide from him. You cower. And you pray the moon does not come for you instead.

Donghyuck was right. He always is. Mark’s not sure he’ll find the shore. So he watches, clutched to the driftwood, the rime of saltwater nipping at his pale skin, and barely keeps up with attacks using his red punches.

“What’s your body count, Your Highness?”

He trips over his own foot. They’re on top of the prison now, and from here he can see his sister’s war balloon waiting for him in the pale moonlight, the Princess of the Fire Nation holding her own bled dagger. She waves from the end of the gondola ride, near the rock’s edge. He stumbles in return, doesn’t see the guard who tries to shoot fire through the opening of his fall, but he doesn’t need to. In a matter of seconds, Donghyuck is hurling the foe to the stairwell. He beckons Mark over from inside their ticket out of the prison, a silver grin plastered to his face.

“Donghyuck, what is wrong with you?” he asks, a cackle stuck in his throat, one too soft for the hot air tainted with resistance. They've finally made it to square one, which moments ago would’ve seemed the impossible. It's still suffocating, but it’s a doable suffocation, better than a few moments ago when there hadn't been any squares carved in the glacier between them. Mark was so sure they'd get nowhere.

For some reason, one he would rather die than admit, a proper address feels no better. _Your Highness_ is all bark. _Your Highness_ is all rules and orders echoing through Donghyuck’s words. _Minhyung,_ though, _Minhyung_ bites in the way Mark knows Donghyuck bites. In the only way Mark knows Donghyuck. Bold, and so unabashedly him. They've made it to square one, but it feels more like they're pushing themselves there, pushing and pushing at each other until someone falls outside the lines. There's no more balance.

“Well, you did leave me here for the better part of two years. And please, get your head out of your royal arse, I meant how many guards you’ve taken down. I was only going to tell you I bet I've taken twice as much.”

Oh, he's not wrong, the prince was too busy staring at the moon child. But what Lee Donghyuck doesn't know won't hurt him.

Mark leaps off the platform and into the ride, landing on light feet. “Enough.” He shuts the door behind him, bending the gondola’s switch so they can leave.

This time, it’s Donghyuck who twitches in confusion, bringing himself out of his daze. He makes a choking noise as the gondola moves up, like a fish out of water, eliciting a dry chuckle from Mark's tongue.

“How did you learn airbending if there aren’t any airbenders left?”

“That’s enough questions for now,” Mark replies, amused. He turns to face the platform terminal and feels Donghyuck glaring at the back of his head. “I’ll explain later."

The sun peeks from behind the clouds, fiery and curious, wavering in the horizon. They’ll make it. They’ll make it in time, before it stands up from the night’s navy boughs. They have to make it. Donghyuck says something, something Mark doesn’t bother to listen to, and he says it again, louder, with a tinge Mark cannot quite place.

“Minhyung.”

Ah, turns out Donghyuck is still all bite and no bark. He sighs, looking straight ahead. The princess is looking back at him, this much he can tell, her lips opening wide. She’s gesticulating with her hands frantically, pointing a finger his direction. Middle, probably. Mark squints in frustration.

“I said later, Donghyuck, we’re almost—”

“Someone’s cutting the line, you imbecile!”

Right as he screams, the gondola comes to a stop. Mark blinks, rushes to the other side, where Donghyuck is already looking ahead. There, standing on the other terminal, a face he knows all too well is giving orders to cut the line.

“Who the hell is that?” He grabs onto the side as the ride shakes. The warden is storming up the stairwell, steam blowing out his ears. But he's not who Donghyuck is referring to, Mark's certain.

From the other terminal, the warden's son looks past him with a cold, tentative stare as the last breath of the night kisses goodbye on the saw's drag. Below the gondola is boiling water, ready to drag anyone foolish enough to try to escape to the volcano’s molten heart. Here, the tides are unwilling, even under an avatar’s hand, and a waterbending master’s hand for that matter.

Mark curses under his breath. _We will survive, we have to survive_. But he can't metalbend their ride up, not unless he wants the nation to know he's the avatar, not unless he wants to die a meaningless death.

“My sister’s betrothed,” he pants, breathless, suppressing a grimace when Donghyuck staggers on unsteady feet. The warden's son knocks his head over to the side, looks at Mark dead on.

He shoots one last blast of fire his way. He doesn’t even see where he shoots, he just does, because he can, and it misses and renders useless like he expected. “And my best friend. Nakamoto Yuta.”

There is a sound, the snap of metal against the white steam, and it grows into the hiss of metal appendages, falls, deep-seated, like crackling lightning. The sky flutters into a sea of orange, deepens into the indigo of a dark summer morning. The wind cleaves through the trees and dawn ripens close to pestilent.

They pray to the moon as she departs, and tilt their heads upwards to meet the rising sun’s glare as they fall.

**Author's Note:**

> leave a comment and or kudo if you liked it!


End file.
